A few months back, I reposted here
an article that I wrote 10 years ago, before the invasion of Iraq: a
fictional scenario of how the Terror War would play out on the ground of
the target nations -- and in the minds of those sent to wage these
campaigns.

I was reminded of that piece by a story in the latest Rolling
Stone.

The RS story, by Michael Hastings,
depicts the drone mentality now consuming the US military-security
apparatus, a process which makes the endless slaughter of the endless
Terror War cheaper, easier, quieter. I didn't anticipate the development
in my proleptic piece; the first reported "kill" by American drones, in Yemen, had taken place just a few weeks before my article appeared in the Moscow Times.

(One of the victims of this historic first drawing of blood
was an American citizen, by the way. Thus from the very beginning, the
drone war -- presented as noble shield to defend American citizens from
harm -- has been killing American citizens, along with the hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of innocent men and women around the
world being murdered without warning -- and without any chance to defend
themselves or take shelter -- by cowards sitting in padded seats behind
computer consoles thousands of miles away, following orders from the
even greater cowards who strut around the Pentagon, CIA headquarters and
the White House.)

But what brought my earlier piece to mind was a brief mention of the
"military slang" now being used to designate the victims of the drones.

Below are a few snippets from my 2002 post, a fictional email by an
occupation soldier to a friend:

Yo, Ed! I’m looking out the window of
Watchtower 19 in Force Zone Seven. They’re loading up the dead wagon.
Three friendlies, two uncardeds, the usual collateral – and one bug. We
zapped the market before the bug got his hard-on – another one of those
Czech AK-47 knock-offs that our friendly neighborhood warlord keeps
bringing in. He says he doesn’t know how the bugs get hold of them –
they drop down from heaven, I guess …

… I’d just come off night patrol in
Deep-City Zone, hardcore bugland, backing up some Special Ops doing a
Guantanamo run on terrorperp suspects. Banging down doors, barrel in the
face of some shrieking bug-woman in her black bag, children scuttling
in the dark like rats, the perp calling down an airstrike from Allah on
our heads. You know the drill. You know the jangle. Not even the new
meds can keep you blanked out completely. So there’s always the
overstep somewhere. Woman’s cheekbone cracking from a backhand, some kid
stomped or booted out of the way. Some perp putting his hand in one of
those damned dresses they wear, going for who knows what – Koran?
Mosquito bite? Scimitar? Czech special? – and you open up. More
shrieking, more screaming – and then the splatter on the wall.

In the new Rolling Stone story, Hastings tells us how America's brave drone warriors view their victims:

For a new generation of young guns, the
experience of piloting a drone is not unlike the video games they grew
up on. Unlike traditional pilots, who physically fly their payloads to a
target, drone operators kill at the touch of a button, without ever
leaving their base – a remove that only serves to further desensitize
the taking of human life. (The military slang for a man killed by a
drone strike is "bug splat," since viewing the body through a
grainy-green video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed.)

"Bugs" being "splattered." This is what Barack Obama -- who has
expanded the drone death squads beyond the imaginings of George W. Bush
-- and all of his brave button pushers and joystick riders think of the
defenseless human beings they are killing (including 174 children by
last count).

This has been the attitude underlying the Terror War since its beginnings.
When I wrote my piece with its "bug" imagery, I was only reflecting
what was already obvious and pervasive, both in the military-security
war machine and in much of the general public. Anyone designated by
those in power as an "enemy" -- for any reason, known or unknown, or for
no reason at all -- is considered a subhuman, an insect, whose
destruction is meaningless, without moral content, like swatting a fly
on the wall. (As, for example, in this 2008 piece about a figure much
lauded by progressives at the time: "Crushing the Ants.")

There is not only a tolerance for this official program of state
murder; there is an absolute enthusiasm for it. Our rulers heartily
enjoy ordering people to be killed. (And to be tortured, as we noted here last week.) It makes them feel good. It makes them feel "hard," in every sense of the word.

As Hastings notes:

From the moment Obama took office,
according to Washington insiders, the new commander in chief evinced a
"love" of drones. "The drone program is something the executive branch
is paying a lot of attention to," says Ken Gude, vice president of the
Center for American Progress. "These weapons systems have become central
to Obama." In the early days of the administration, then-chief of staff
Rahm Emanuel would routinely arrive at the White House and demand, "Who
did we get today?"

Here are some examples of what Rahm and his then-boss, the Nobel
Peace Prize Laureate, were "getting" with their flying deaths squads:

But for every "high-value" target killed
by drones, there's a civilian or other innocent victim who has paid the
price. The first major success of drones – the 2002 strike that took out
the leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen – also resulted in the death of a U.S.
citizen. More recently, a drone strike by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in
2010 targeted the wrong individual – killing a well-known human rights
advocate named Zabet Amanullah who actually supported the U.S.-backed
government. The U.S. military, it turned out, had tracked the wrong
cellphone for months, mistaking Amanullah for a senior Taliban leader. A
year earlier, a drone strike killed Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the
Pakistani Taliban, while he was visiting his father-in-law; his wife was
vaporized along with him. But the U.S. had already tried four times to
assassinate Mehsud with drones, killing dozens of civilians in the
failed attempts. One of the missed strikes, according to a human rights
group, killed 35 people, including nine civilians, with reports that
flying shrapnel killed an eight-year-old boy while he was sleeping.
Another blown strike, in June 2009, took out 45 civilians, according to
credible press reports.

And of course there is this, the follow-up to the "extrajudicial
killing" of U.S. citizen Anwar al-Awlaki. After killing al-Awlaki --
without ever charging him with a single crime -- the Obama
administration then murdered his 16-year-old son (as we noted here last year).

Hastings writes:

In the days following the killing, Nasser
and his wife received a call from Anwar's 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman
al-Awlaki, who had run away from home a few weeks earlier to try to find
his now-deceased father in Yemen. "He called us and gave us his
condolences," Nasser recalls. "We told him to come back, and he promised
he would. We really pressed him, me and his grandmother."

The teenage boy never made it home. Two
weeks after that final conversation, his grandparents got another phone
call from a relative. Abdulrahman had been killed in a drone strike in
the southern part of Yemen, his family's tribal homeland. The boy, who
had no known role in Al Qaeda or any other terrorist operation, appears
to have been another victim of Obama's drone war: Abdulrahman had been
accompanying a cousin when a drone obliterated him and seven others. The
suspected target of the killing – a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula – is reportedly still alive; it's unclear whether he was even
there when the strike took place.

The news devastated the family. "My wife
weeps every day and every morning for her grandson," says Nasser, a
former high-ranking member of the Yemenite government. "He was a nice,
gentle boy who liked to swim a lot. This is a boy who did nothing
against America or against anything else. A boy. He is a citizen of the
United States, and there are no reasons to kill him except that he is
Anwar's son."

The boy was probably killed in a "signature strike," where bold and
brave CIA analysts sit back in their chairs and observe people going
about their business in a foreign country far away. If their activities
look "suspicious" according to some arbitrary, secret criteria, then
they can be slaughtered instantly by a drone missile -- even if the
attackers have no idea whatsoever who the targets are or what they are
actually doing. Plotting terrorism, or praying? Organizing jihad, or
holding a wedding? Building bombs, or having lunch? The attackers don't
know -- and can't know. They simply put down their Cheetohs and fire the
missile. Who cares? It's just "bug splatter."

And the fact is, no one does care. As Hastings notes, this
hideous program of murder and terror has been fully embraced by the
political elite and by society at large. And our rulers are now bringing
it back home with a vengeance, putting more and more Americans under
the unsleeping eye of government drones watching their every move,
looking for the "signature" of "suspicious" behaviour.

Hastings writes:

In the end, it appears, the
administration has little reason to worry about any backlash from its
decision to kill an American citizen – one who had not even been charged
with a crime. A recent poll shows that most Democrats overwhelmingly
support the drone program, and Congress passed a law in February that
calls for the Federal Aviation Administration to "accelerate the
integration of unmanned aerial systems" in the skies over America.
Drones, which are already used to fight wildfires out West and keep an
eye on the Mexican border, may soon be used to spy on U.S. citizens at
home: Police in Miami and Houston have reportedly tested them for
domestic use, and their counterparts in New York are also eager to
deploy them.

History affords few if any examples of a free people -- in such a
powerful country, under no existential threat, undergoing no invasion,
no armed insurrection, no natural disaster or epidemic or societal
collapse -- giving up their own freedoms so meekly, so mutely. Most
Americans like to boast of their love of freedom, their rock-ribbed
independence and their fiercely-held moral principles: yet they are
happy to see the government claim -- and use -- the power to murder
innocent people whenever it pleases while imposing an ever-spreading
police state regimen on their lives and liberties. Sheep doped with
Rohypnol would put up a stronger fight than these doughty patriots.

Hasting's story should be read in full. In its straightforward
marshalling of facts and refusal to simply parrot the spin of the
powerful (something we used to call "journalism," kids; ask your
grandparents about it, they might remember), it lays out the hideous
reality of our times. I am tempted to call it an important story -- but I
know that it will sink with scarcely a ripple into the abyss of our
toxic self-regard. A few will read it and be horrified; the rest will
stay riveted on the oh-so-exciting and oh-so-important race to see who
will get to perpetuate this vile and murderous system for the next four
years.